Two years ago, Ars was invited to Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center to watch a team of engineers from NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne fire up some 50-year old rocket components—specifically, the gas generator of an enormous Rocketdyne F-1 engine. Watching the gas generator shoot out 31,000 lbs of thrust (more than an F-16 puts out at full afterburner) was amazing, but it was even more amazing to realize that in the full F-1 engine, all that thrust and power was used just to run the turbopump that pushed fuel into the combustion chamber.
It wasn’t all for show, either—Huntsville-based Dynetics, working with Aerojet Rocketdyne, was pitching a gigantic new F-1 based rocket engine called the F-1B as a contender in NASA’s Advanced Booster Competition. Dynetics hoped that NASA would choose its F-1B-powered "Pyrios" concept as the preferred strap-on booster for the upcoming Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket (referred to as "SLS") that NASA is building.
But that was two years ago, and time and political pressure have shaped and extended the Advanced Booster Competition—which has morphed into an activity now called the Advanced Booster Engineering Demonstration and/or Risk Reduction, or just "ABEDRR." And it’s looking like a more conventional shuttle-style solid fuel strap-on booster will be powering NASA’s SLS rocket to orbit—at least at first.
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